PARTISAN REVIEW
289
Whitman, she began again in the lyrical present a celebration of that
unknown discursive
I.
Nor did she ever lose the exuberance of this vision.
In
1945, after the liberation of France, she greeted the American Army
with what became her last narrative,
Brewsie and Willie.
It
was a careful
and loving study of the colloquial speech of two GIs that simply went on
and on before breaking off. The
Geographical History
ends: "I am not
sure that is not the end."
Neil Schmitz
THE UNFINALITY OF TRANSLATION
NEW POEMS (1968-1970). By Pablo Neruda. Bilingual Edition. Trans·
lated. edited. and with an Introduction by Ben Belitt. Grove Press. $5.95.
NERUDA AND VALLEJO: SELECTED POEMS. Edited by Robert Bly.
Translations by Robert Bly. John Knoepfle. and James Wright. Beacon
Press. $9.95.
EMERGENCY POEMS. By Nicanor Parra. Edited and Translated by
Miller Williams. New Directions. $2.75 paper.
STOLEN APPLES. By Yevgeny Yevtushenko. English adaptations by
James Dickey. Geoffrey Dutton. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Anthony Kahn.
Stanley Kunitz. George Reavey. John Updike. Richard Wilbur.
Doubleday. $8.95.
BEOWULF. Translated by Michael Alexander. Penguin Classics. 35p.
THE AENEID OF VIRGIL: A Verse Translation. By Allen Mandelbaum.
University of California Press. $10.00.
It
may seem odd to include in a batch of six volumes of verse
translation a version of an ancient and anonymous epic, written in a
language which is the ancestor of modern English, but which nobody can
read without learning it as a foreign language. (I have been told that the
Frisian language of Holland, which is quite different from ordinary
Dutch or Flemish, is what modern English would be like, if there had
been no Norman Conquest and if England had remained a basically
agricultural country.)
There is, of course, a purely personal reason: I learned Spanish at
school and still read it easily and can speak it haltingly; I learned
some
Anglo-Saxon at university and can still pick my way through an
Anglo-Saxon text with a crib. But there are more valid reasons.
Beowulf
marks the transition between a basically oral tradition of poetry and art
poetry.
It
feels naive and yet it is full of the kind of tricky verbal devices,
